Assessing the effectiveness of a talent development program is crucial. Traditionally, assessment primarily has relied on testing knowledge acquisition either directly or through limited applications of knowledge. With most development programs moving to self-paced, online formats, the assessment of talent development has followed suit, using unproctored online approaches. The opportunity to circumvent unproctored online assessments has long been a concern of those working in the learning and development (L&D) space. With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI), this concern has morphed into panic.
A common reaction to the threat of AI for assessment is to turn back the clock. This response advocates for a return to approaches that eliminate or minimize the opportunity to use technology when completing assessments as part of talent development. For example, many in the education sector are returning to in-person assessments that preclude the use of technology, such as scantrons and bluebooks. This approach has intuitive appeal and requires little change to the content of talent development programs or to the methods used to assess them.
However, this approach is doomed to fail. It limits our capacity to creatively evaluate skills and competencies that we need our employees and leaders to develop. It also ignores the reality that AI is rapidly changing the nature of many jobs, the ways we work, and how leaders manage their teams and organizations.
EMBRACING AI FOR ASSESSMENT
Instead of investing energy to prevent the use of AI in the assessment of talent development, we should embrace it. There are simple ways to start.
- Use AI to learn a new task, work on a longstanding problem, or improve your skills in a developmental area. In other words, learn how to learn/develop using AI. Part of the concern about AI’s impact on talent assessment is a lack of familiarity with how the tools work or what they can do. Explore what AI has to offer, as well as understanding its limitations and shortcomings. If you are relatively new to AI tools, you likely will be shocked by what AI can do and by the opportunities to develop using it.
- Focus on the aspects of AI that are unique from an assessment perspective. For example, providing effective feedback is a mainstay of managerial development programs. Yet, it is difficult to evaluate if feedback skills have improved using existing assessment tools. AI can help. Many current AI tools offer modules that provide coaching and role-play interactions for giving feedback during an employee performance conversation. It can provide a manager with targeted advice on their feedback strategy, tone, and how to handle different employee reactions. Specific interactions can be constructed to evaluate if managers can effectively navigate various scenarios they may encounter during performance conversations with their employees.
- Re-think what you are assessing about your talent development. Instead of focusing primarily on evaluating knowledge acquisition, consider leveraging AI tools to determine problem-solving ability by using the acquired knowledge. For example, construct a case study exercise that can only be solved by providing the right prompts or questions to an AI tool—which would only be known if one has some level of mastery of the knowledge domain. After the case is complete, individuals could be asked to explain their approach or strategy to solving the problem and why they used specific prompts or questions as a further assessment of development. AI is not a panacea for every assessment challenge in talent development, but it will help in many of them.
AI is here to stay and will continue to change a variety of our existing practices. Embracing these changes will open the door to some novel and exciting opportunities to assess talent development that were not viable even a year ago.